The NHS has appointed an information technology supremo charged with rescuing the service's faltering e-strategy - and made him the highest paid manager in the health service, if not the entire public sector.
Richard Granger, a partner with Deloitte Consulting, will be paid around £250,000 a year as the director general of NHS information technology - around £90,000 more than the NHS chief executive, Nigel Crisp, earns, and £125,000 more than the health secretary, Alan Milburn.
Mr Granger will be responsible for implementing the NHS information and technology programme, regarded as one of the world's largest IT projects, which aims to wire up the entire health service.
The programme will see the roll out the of electronic transfer of patient records, laboratory tests, prescriptions and electronic booking of patient appointments across the thousands of organisations making up the NHS.
The advertisement for the job, published in June this year, described the job as "a Herculean task [that]... will demand an individual of extraordinary talent and experience" .
The NHS has suffered from a fragmented a piecemeal approach to IT over the past few years, which has seen multitudes of local IT systems spring up which are incompatible with other systems in the organisation.
Mr Crisp today welcomed the appointment: "Without a doubt, this is the IT challenge of the decade and I am confident that Richard's skills and experience put him in a unique position to deliver it.
"We needed an outstanding director to deliver a world class programme and that is what we now have."
Mr Granger joined Deloitte Consulting in October 1998, since when his clients have included Transport for London, the Department of Education and Employment, and the former Department for Social Security.
Although he will be accountable to Professor Sir John Pattison, the Department of Health director of research , analysis and information, Mr Grainger will have the freedom to choose his own programme team.
He starts his job at the end of this month.
